Bud had a rough week last week. He was neutered, injected with powerful medications to kill his heartworm and he lost his best pal Albert, who will either be adopted this week or shipped to Rhode Island and brought out to popular adoption events, where many people go to find dogs.
We know more about Bud. He is sweet, playful, and he loves to steal bags of potato chips and other foods his partner in crime, Carol Johnson’s cat, pushes off the counters.
He and Fate may well be a daunting team. Bud is still more than a month away, looking towards early October. I’m not great at waiting, but Bud is already teaching me patience.
It’s strange, but I very much consider But our dog, yet he has no idea who I am or where he is going. I think But will be happy to settle down in what we believe will be his final home.
I look forward to meeting him, loving him and helping him learn how to be safe and happy on our farm and in our lives. I think the hardest days are over for Bud, it’s just a few weeks now.
Our friend Susan Popper is new to our town, she has also become friends with Carol Gulley, as are Maria and I.
Without really meaning to, we have become something of a regular dinner group, we seem to be taking turns having dinner at each other’s house. First we had dinner at our farmhouse, tonight at Susan’s new house in Cambridge, and Saturday, Carol is cooking.
It’s a kind of accidental thing, but we have all enjoyed it and want to keep going. I want to say that Carol, for all that she has endured, and all that she may endure – grieving is a very personal and individual thing – is all right.
She is certainly sad and acutely feeling Ed’s loss, but she is also thinking about her life and talking about her life, and sometimes, even laughing about her life.
Sometimes she needs to talk, but she also wants to listen, and that is how friendships begin.
So our dinners are not a support group, Carol doesn’t need that, they are a group of friends sharing their lives with one another, we all have good stories to tell, we all want to hear the stories of one another. I think we will all be meeting regularly.
Carol is honest and open, she is committed to her writing, and to her blog. She worries about how she will do without Ed to share her ideas, or to live her life, but I told her that she has been writing the blog on her own for months now and she is a natural writer, full of humor, insight and authenticity.
She said she sometimes savors being alone, she has not really had a chance to think and adjust to this staggering new reality. She sounds very healthy to me, she needs time and space to think.
Ed was her life in many ways and shared her life in so many ways for 47 years. She will endure what she needs to endure and move forward with her life, that much seems clear to me.
Carol is almost obsessively polite, and I hope she learns to fend off people who intrude on her life without asking or thinking. That is up to her.
Carol is a writer now, she is only beginning to come to grips with that idea. She writes almost every day on her blog, the Bejosh Farm Journal she writes poems and tells stores and shares the trauma, drama, love and exploration of her life. Carol is a fierce critic of Carol, she is a harsh judge of her own work and she is almost always sure she is letting everybody down.
I tell her what I tell all of my other writing students, she should never speak ill of her own work, it might be listening. I told her that I ask only two questions when I write: how do I feel, and is it the truth. If the answer to both questions is yes, I go ahead and write.
I have to say Carol is somewhat familiar to me, another woman with many gifts who does not know how talented she is, and who is struggling to find her voice, especially now that she is alone and “My Farmer” is no longer the focus of her writing.
She is, and that is a big change.
The British writer Deborah Levy asks in her new memoir The Cost Of Living, what if a woman is the main character of her own story? She writes about the challenge of finding her voice in a world “fathered by masculine consciousness.”
I see Carol finding her voice.
I said weeks ago that I have been privileged to witness Carol ascending.
Her strength and creativity and curiosity are emerging slowly but steadily from her long nightmare. In some ways, she lived in the shadow of Ed for many of those years, he was a strong and dominant man.
Now, she has some freedom in her life, it was not freedom she sought or wanted, but I think it is very real and will one day be important to her.
We traded stories, and Carol was as open and self-aware as I have ever seen her.
She is, it turns out, very social – something she didn’t have time to explore as a busy dairy farmer – and especially loves the company of women. She is looking for her tribe, her community. I think she is finding it.
Carol and I are very good friends, but I am not blind, she is most at ease with women like Susan and Maria, who talk openly and honestly, and who are safe and nourishing. Sometimes, the mere prescence of men is dampening and suffocating.
Maria knows how to listen, and she has a great gift for encouragement. Susan knows how to laugh, and as different as these two women are, they seemed to connect easily with one another. Carol’s life and heart are with her family and farm world, she will decided in the coming months and years if her universe will really expand. It seems it already is.
Carol doesn’t need to hear how bad things will be, she knows that all too well. She needs to hear that she is strong and smart and has so much to offer the world, even without her beloved Ed. She needs to talk about life, not death.
She needs to be encouraged to step out into the light when she is able and ready, and cheered along the way. That is sincere, it was a great joy to see her tonight, and then again, on Saturday. This group might ultimately be better without me in it, and if so, I’ll bow out of it.
I never tell anyone what is ahead when it comes to grieving, I don’t know. But I had a strong and good feeling about Carol tonight, she is awakening and thinking and hoping, as well as grieving.
My new Blue Lamp – Maria bought it for me today in Brattleboro, Vt., for $40 – has all kinds of possibilities, it functions as a beautiful spotlight I can put on some of the strange creatures who share my workspace, from my marble muse to this dancer from The Night Of The Dead, in New Mexico. She looks like she’s performing, and she probably is.
I think this Blue Lamp is going to be great fun for this photographer.
Maria and I have this habit, when we go to old antique stores, we each usually find something to buy the other. There are several vintage antique shops in Brattleboro, and I’ve bought all of my desk lamps there.
I call them Raymond Chandler lamps, because they look like lamps that might have sat on Philip Marlowe’s desk on Hollywood Boulevard.
Usually, it’s something that supports or promotes our creativity. In New Mexico, Maria bought me this charming lady on the “Night Of The Dead,” she keeps me company when I write and reminds me of our looming mortality.
I love old, vintage desk lamps, I’ve always written to the light of them and to very old desks. I have one old lamp on my desk, I need another for the other side of my desk, it gets dark after sundown. I spotted this vintage blue desk lamp and I picked it up to look at it, Maria said she wanted to buy it from me, it cost $40.
A few seconds later I saw a used book of photos from Patti Smith, who has carried a Polaroid camera around for years. I bought it for Maria, it cost $10. Maria doesn’t like it if I spent a lot of money on her gifts, so I keep them inexpensive.
Maria and I both admire Pattie Smith and I knew the book would inspire Maria to create something lovely and original, which is always great fun to see.
When we got to our hotel, I set the lamp up on the windowsill and started reading the new Martha Grimes mystery, no one does mystery books better than these gifted British women. They just rock. I love my new lamp, it belongs on my desk.
Friday, I opened up a special account with my bank, it is under the auspices of the Bedlam Farm name, as required by new banking laws, but it is the Sakler Moo Educational Fund and it is separate.
I put a few hundred dollars in there and am accepting donations all year for the $6,000 I will need to pay the balance of his tuition at the Albany Academy after Sakler’s scholarship contribution from the school.
The Albany Academy is a very fine, nationally known private school, a perfect place for Salker, it will open up some doors for him that will shape the rest of his life.
Last week did make me nervous. I took over tuition payments for Sakler’s mother, Lae Pwy, she will try to raise the money- her share is $2,000 – but it will be a lot harder for her than for me, or so I believe. In addition, we had to come up with more than $2,000 to repair the brakes on Ali’s big Red Van, the soccer team’s lifeline and means to independence.
So all told, I wrote $8,000 in checks, way more than ever.
This week, I would like to pay for about $700 in new clothes so that the refugee team players going to high school for the first time will have the right clothes to avoid the inevitable ridicule and judgement of their new American peers who value clothes highly.
it is important to them.
Before the tuition fund and van contributions, I had raised about some money for the clothes, which we need to buy this week. I don’t have a total, things moved quickly last week.
The expenditures last week blew my fund and my plans up and I am scrambling and re-organizing.
So okay, I do need some help.
Last week was unusual, a record for expenditures to the refugee fund, and I have a year to raise the tuition money for Sakler for 2019 although I will start saving now. I always try to keep at least $2,000 in the refugee fund, after all these tuition checks clear this week, I’ll have about $800 or $900, and I am uneasy spending $700 of that.
For the first time, the soccer players are nervous about being photographed, they don’t want their classmates to see them buying new clothes or having someone buy them for them, and I completely understand that.
But I have also explained to them that I have an absolutely rigid rule about raising money. I don’t raise money for anyone I can’t photograph, the people who send me money are entitled to see where the money is going and what for.
That is the foundation of the work with the Army of Good, the source of faith and trust, and I have never violated it unless it was simply impossible. I’ve been struggling with Muslim women all year to get them to agree to being photographed, and i don’t like doing it, but it is non-negotiable. As a reporter, I didn’t mind pressuring people to talk to me, or have their picture taken, now I’d rather not.
But this is what has worked for me, for us.
My plan is to raise some money for the clothes – I’ll make up the short fall if there is one – and I will take a photo of the boys (or girls) from a distance, and perhaps in silhouette. I had a teenaged daughter, I remember what that phase of life was like.
I will not use their names or show recognizable faces, I know how to do that.
But images are the basis for this work as well as words, and I can’t and won’t compromise.
I also feel they ought to know that the money that supports them is hard fought, I can’t make it and don’t have it. It comes from people who expect and deserve transparency, and I won’t abandon that, even for the sensibilities of teenagers.
I’ll protect their privacy.
It seems like a fair compromise to me, these kids are wonderful and have never before balked at being photographed, so I know its an important issue for them, and I want to respect it. I also want them to respect the effort that goes into receiving money from a lot of people, few if any of whom are wealthy.
If you can or wish to help this week, you can send a contribution to my post office box in my name (as now required by law), Jon Katz. P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816, or via Paypal, [email protected]. Please mark any check or payment either to “Sakler Moo Fund,” or to “soccer team clothes.”
All the money will go where it’s supposed to go, we have no adminstrative costs other than gasoline, and the accounts area audited monthly by a bookkeeper and a New York City accounting firm. Thanks. We won’t have too many weeks like this, I want to get thing back in order.
